"Add to cart" button…but with a link to "View Cart" if desired?

[Chris Lambright]

Maybe I’m confused over something simple, but I’ve looked and cannot find an obvious solutions just yet, so maybe someone can give me some hints:

What I’d like is to be able to have the simple short code show an item and the ‘Add to Cart’ button, etc. as it normally does, but not have to open the shopping cart on every page after they add an item. I’d rather have a link or small button off to one side to “View cart/Checkout” so if they want to see the cart right then, they can click that link and go to the checkout page.

What I’ve noticed first is that, if I leave off the shopping cart shortcode, when someone clicks the “Add to Cart” button the whole page flashes for a second before refreshing, presumably while it’s loading the cart. The sudden flash doesn’t look very professional, but I don’t know any way to stop it.

Using the shortcode for just the button and making my own link for the checkout page, my link appears outside the grey outline for the product created by the shortcode, which also looks a little nappy. It would be nice to be able to put an optional link or buttons inside the grey outline so it all looks uniform.

The idea of a widget to display the cart is nice, but in my case the only real option is to put it in a widget that shows on every page, which means it stares you in the face on the right column of every page. If I make it a compact display, it still says “Shopping Cart” in the widget, whether there is anything in the cart of not, and looks bad standing out on every page. I’m working on my own code to show a small shopping cart icon in the widget, but then it’s stuck visible all the time.

My last option is to find a way to insert a link to ‘View Cart’ in the menu (though I have limited space), or in the header, though I’d rather save that for other things..so, if there’s a nifty way to have a ‘View Cart’ button show up somewhere unobtrusive but that is definitely visible to a customer who looks for it, I’m open to ideas or looking at examples. But I’d sure love to get rid of the white flash whenever someone just hits the “Add to Cart” button when it doesn’t immediately pop-open the shopping cart.

Thanks…hope this makes sense,

Chris L.

[admin]

Use the compact cart option on the sidebar. The compact cart only shows how many items are in the cart and has a “view cart” link that links to the checkout page (the URL that you specify in the “Checkout Page” field of the settings).

[Chris Lambright]

I thought I’d follow-up on my own post and say how I’ve managed to do a little of what I wanted:

To be able to show the “total items in cart” display on specific pages that apply to buying a product, I downloaded two plugins, a)a plugin that let’s you run PHP code inside a widget, and b) a plugin that let me specify on what pages a widget will display.

I put the php code to display the “total items in cart” in an instance of the php-code widget, and then limited that widget to display in the widget area, but only on the pages I wanted. It’s a hack, and not the final solution I’m working toward, but it works. I’d created a small graphic pointing to the box showing the total items, and now it will only be seen when you’re on a page that could lead to purchasing, not on other generic pages.

-C

[Author]

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